ADULT FICTIONAlexie, Robert Arthur. Porcupines and China Dolls. Toronto: Stoddart, 2002.Alexie’s novel is set in a small, northern community and portrays the lives of two close friends, James and Jake; they struggle with traumatic histories that have driven them to spend years drinking and concealing their pain in promiscuous relationships or emotional withdrawal. Both were sexually abused at the residential hostel where they lived while attending school, but they have never spoken about their shared experiences. Porcupines and China Dolls opens and closes with the same scene, as James stands at the side of the highway, alone, pulling the trigger on his gun. The novel holds out the possibility of beginning to heal from a traumatic history alongside a more cynical awareness of how the conventions of therapeutic discourse have been manipulated and emptied of meaning. At a community healing workshop, most attendees looking “liked [sic] they were there for some root canal work and wished it was over so they could get on to more important things like bingo or poker. Half of those in attendance were from out of town and few, if any, had a genuine interest in the healing process. But it was a chance to travel to another community, visit old friends and put in for some honoraria and meal money” (181). The bureaucrats in attendance are singularly lacking in self-awareness and knowledge of historical context, failing to appreciate the stinging implication of his words when “The Chief thanked them for their hard work and dedication to healing and the healing process, stating for the record that if it weren’t for people like them, where would they be?” (182)

Bartleman, James. As Long as the Rivers Flow. Toronto: Alfred A.Knopf Canada, 2011.The former Ontario Lieutenant-Governor’s first novel depicts a northern Ontario Anishinabek woman’s experiences. The novel opens with Martha’s thirteen year old daughter, Raven, contemplating her suicide pact with three friends; it culminates in a healing circle. Coincidences crop up several times in the novel, most notably when Martha, who has been living in Toronto for many years, locates her long-lost son Spider, taken from her custody when he was just a baby, only a few days before she is planning to leave the city to return home. Their reunion is a crucial plot point and also underlines Bartleman’s central message of healing and reconciliation.

Boyden, Joseph. Three Day Road. Toronto: Viking Canada/Penguin, 2005.Three Day Road is a gritty First World War war novel partly inspired by the renowned Ojibwa sniper Francis Pegahmagabow, whose exploits were celebrated in Europe but largely forgotten when he returned to Canada and the familiar pain of racial discrimination and mistreatment. Xavier, one of the two central characters, keeps himself apart from the non-Aboriginal men in the company, preferring to isolate himself, and drawing strength from his recollections of the aunt who raised him, Niska, while his friend Elijah becomes increasingly boastful, basking in the praise of his superiors and his fellow soldiers. Comparing the two men, Boyden attributes Xavier’s ability to survive, “not unscathed, by any means” to the fact that “he has a grounding in who he is and where he comes from, whereas Elijah is raised in the residential school and that in part feeds into what end up happening to him . . . . He isn’t grounded in his place or culture, and this ends up being very damaging to him” (230). The novel moves back and forth in time as Niska attempts to nurse her nephew back to health. Both Xavier and Niska recall events from their childhoods and youth; each was affected by a brief but painful exposure to residential school life.

Burns, Sarah Felix. Song over Quiet Lake. Toronto: Second Story Press, 2009.This novel by non-Indigenous Ontario writer Sarah Felix Burns is based in part on a residential school survivor that Burns met at the University of British Columbia. Lydie Jim, the character inspired by this friendship, is a Tlingit elder born near Quiet Lake in the Yukon on her parents’ trapline. Lydie’s family history includes multiple tragedies and traumas. The young woman who becomes her tutor, and then her friend, Sylvia Hardy, has had her own share of family difficulties, centering around her small brother’s disappearance years earlier when she was supposed to be supervising him, and her mother’s subsequent rejection of her after her brother was found murdered. As reviews suggested about Melanie J. Murray’s drama, A Very Polite Genocide, which also draws on multiple personal and historical traumas to recount a residential schools story, there seems to be a surfeit here of devastating experiences of loss and trauma. The cumulative effect risks overwhelming the narrative. Several episodic chapters dealing with an elderly Anglican priest, Father MacAvoy, who is struggling with his fraught memories of the residential school era and with an episode dating back to his own childhood, his complicity in the drowning of a young disabled boy. Burns works to draw parallels between these three characters, comparing their struggles to come to terms with a painful past, and gradually revealing the crucial historical connection between Father MacAvoy and Lydie Jim.

Crate, Joan. Black Apple. Toronto: Simoin & Schuster Canada, 2016.

Hayden Taylor, Drew. Motorcycles & Sweet Grass. Toronto: Alfred A. Knopf Canada/Random House, 2010.In Drew Hayden Taylor’s first novel for adults, residential school history, debates over how to use reclaimed reserve land, and efforts to regain cultural practices and language are treated with the author’s characteristic ironic and playful critique of colonial power. Hayden Taylor’s accomplished contemporary trickster tale provides a means of incorporating residential school history into a community’s complicated contemporary social and family relationships. He acknowledges losses–notably one school survivor’s lifelong battle with traumatic nightmares and painful self-medication through alcohol–without suggesting that they have fatally undermined the community’s ability to move forward. At the same time, he is pragmatic about the kinds of political and bureaucratic quagmires facing reserve administrators as they struggle to assist their Nations’ in achieving greater autonomy and self-determination within a web of still-colonial relationships. Losses of language and culture are mourned; the younger speakers of Anishinabe have limited fluency, while some parents are choosing to raise their children–like the conscientious Dakota, Virgil’s cousin–with limited contact to First Nations’ stories and languages. The efforts to reclaim language and culture and to indigenize forms of expression are treated with both sympathy and, in the depiction of Wayne’s isolation and idiosyncratic training program, some humour.

Highway, Tomson. Kiss of the Fur Queen. Toronto: Doubleday Canada, 1998.Highway’s semi-autobiographical novel deals with two northern Manitoba boys snatched away to a residential school where they experience religious indoctrination and sexual abuse that marks them with shame. Through their pursuit of their respective artistic talents–in music and dance–they attempt to overcome the complicated legacies of their childhoods. Highway’s wry and ironic novel invokes figures from Cree religious traditions, including the cannibalistic Weetigo, in a powerful depiction of cultural survivance. Violence against Indigenous women is a crucial theme, with the recurring images of women taken from Winnipeg and found murdered.

McGregor, Stephen. Two Trails Narrow. Penticton, BC: Theytus Books, 2008.The novel deals largely with wartime, but the opening chapters are set in a residential school, and McGregor portrays scenes of graphic violence featuring horrifically abusive priests and nuns. The most sadistic of the abusive staff members, Father Speidel, goes as far as to concoct an offense by an innocent young girl as a way to justify beating her; the pleasure he takes in the children’s humiliation and pain is noted several times. A revenge fantasy is enacted when several of the older children assault him, dislocating his shoulder, as they prepare to run away from the school.

GRAPHIC NOVELSDownie, Gord, and Jeff Lemire. Secret Path. Toronto: Simon & Schuster Canada, 2017. Downie's song lyrics for his Secret Path project (which included a CD and live performances) accompany Lemire's drawings. Based on the life of residential school student Chanie Wenjack, this is now a widely-adopted curriculum resource. It has significant limitations, but it does highlight student resistance to residential schools, including the substantial number of runaways, some of whom, like Chanie Wenjack, died while attempting to return home.